Day 24 — A Roomful of Drama Queens

Today was hilarious. In the afternoon, I read the kids “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”, which is the story of a kid who has everything go wrong. He has gum in his hair. He gets his sweater wet. He has no toy in the cereal, when his 2 brothers do. You get the picture. Alexander keeps talking about going to Australia, and at the end, his mother says that everyone has a bad day once in awhile, even in Australia.

I asked the children if these ‘bad things’ could happen to Alexander, even in Australia. The question seemed to perplex them. “Oh, no, Ms Education. It’s peaceful in Australia”. After much explanation, they realized that one could get gum stuck in their hair, or trip over their skateboard, even down under.

We did lots of ‘tableaux’ of the scenes in the story. The favourite was when they were in the car, during the ‘car pool’ scene (they thought that a ‘car pool’ was a car wash…nothing is simple in my room!)  They took turns ‘driving’ the car, and being Alexander, squished in the middle of the car, with no window to call his own. These kids can’t drive. They kept having accidents, and looking at the chaos behind them. I told Peter that he ran over a squirrel, which induced more hysterics in all 6 of them. Keep your eyes on the road, Peter!
This is the first group I’ve had who have really good imaginations. I asked Bernadette what she saw when she looked out the window, and she said ‘A man and his dog’ ‘A famous singer’ ‘my mom’. In years past, kids would have said ‘I don’t know’ or ‘nothing’.

This morning,  we did ‘perimeter’ in math. One of the questions was about measuring the deck of a house. That became a huge issue, as no one knew what a ‘deck’ was. ‘Desk?’ asked Ivy. ‘Nope, DECK’, I replied. I can’t draw, but tried to explain with my sad stick-house drawing of a deck. I hope they got it. Not sure.

One thing about teaching Deaf kids….ASSUME NOTHING!! Words or concepts that you think they’ll understand, they don’t. ‘Desk’ for ‘deck’ was only one example from today.  ‘Carpool’, which you’d think kids would understand, or have some experience with, they thought was a ‘car wash’. Everything takes much longer than with hearing kids. After our long drama session today, we were all so exhausted,  that we took out some ‘fun’ worksheets (crosswords, colouring pages) so the kids could just rest.

Listening all day is hard work.